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We Are Hiring!

Position Available: Managing Editor

The New Quarterly Literary Society Inc.
Location: 290 Westmount Rd. N, Waterloo, ON, Canada N2L 3G3
Job type: Full-time role; flexible hours and hybrid working arrangements negotiable
Salary: $40,000-43,000
Vacation: Four weeks, including two during the December holiday period

Date posted: 2021/09/28
Application deadline: 2021/10/12

Description:

The New Quarterly (TNQ), an award-winning not-for-profit literary magazine, is searching for its next Managing Editor. TNQ was established in 1981 and publishes fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. The organization is renowned for finding, as well as nurturing, emerging writers and for supporting established talent.  More information about The New Quarterly can be found at: www.tnq.ca.

In addition to passionate support of the writing community, the person we are looking for is a detail-oriented, resourceful generalist who enjoys the variety and responsibility that comes from being involved in all aspects of a small, collegial not-for-profit.

The Managing Editor works closely with the Editor and Board of Directors to manage TNQ’s day-to-day operations. The successful candidate will also collaborate with staff and volunteers in the coordination and execution of TNQ events, including writing contests, the Podcast Project, the X-Page Project, and the Wild Writers Literary Festival. The New Quarterly, an equal opportunity employer, values diversity and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind. 

Key Responsibilities:

Marketing, Public Relations, and Audience Development/Circulation

  • Manage writing contest marketing and administration
  • Secure and manage new print and online advertising
  • Develop audience expansion strategies
  • Actively manage social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, newsletter, etc.)
  • Seek appropriate partnerships with other organizations
  • Plan and promote public outreach events
  • Write appropriate copy, such as press releases, as required

TNQ Funding

  • Work with the Editor to execute annual grant calendar; apply for annual operating and program grants; fulfill all reporting/grant or recognition requirements with support from the Office Administrator and Treasurer
  • Take the lead in researching, writing, submitting, and reporting for grants
  • Conduct annual fundraising/donation appeals
  • Develop new sources of revenue (e.g. products and/or services)

Web Editing

  • Manage quality and content of TNQ’s website and blog, and write copy as required
  • Monitor, analyze, and optimize Web statistics
  • Keep abreast of industry trends

Management & Administration

  • Recruit and manage in-house volunteers and co-op students
  • Work with Board committees: Finance, Marketing & Communications,

Fundraising, Governance

  • Oversee the logistics, administration, ticket sales, and marketing for the Wild Writers Literary Festival in conjunction with the WWLF collective
  • Work with the Treasurer and Editor to develop annual budgets and to monitor actual results vs. budget
  • Attend quarterly Board meetings and work with Editor to prepare related reports

Qualifications

  • Undergraduate degree and/or college diploma in English, Communications, Publishing, or other relevant field required
  • Proven experience as a Managing Editor or other relevant role
  • Publishing experience an asset
  • Strong up-to-date knowledge of office productivity tools, publishing and subscription management programs and online platforms, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe Creative Suite, WordPress, MailChimp, Zoom meeting and Zoom webinar functions, and social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram)
  • Proficiency in English and strong writing, editing, and copywriting skills
  • Experience with grant writing and the grant application process an asset
  • Experience developing and maintaining budgets an asset
  • Ability to solve problems and take initiative, strong organizational skills, keen attention to detail
  • Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, and ability to build on and develop partnerships
  • Ability to work well as part of a small team as well as comfortable working independently
  • Ability to work evenings and weekends, as required, particularly during the Wild Writers Literary Festival

 

To apply, please send a cover letter and résumé to akolentsis@newquarterly.net noting “TNQ Managing Editor” in the subject line.

We appreciate the interest of all applicants; however, we will only contact you if you are selected for an interview.

The 2021 Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award Winners

The New Quarterly is pleased to announce the winners of the 2021 Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award!

Winner

“Something Really Unbelievable” by Nicole Smith

Runner-Up

“Mushroom Girl” by Lizzie Derksen

Shortlist (to be published)

“The Last Time She Saw Charlie” by Carol Hay

“Florence” by Hilary Ball

“(In)Auspicious” by Alana Rigby

Look for the winners’ mentions in The New Quarterly’s Fall 2021 Issue 160. Thank you to all of the writers who participated this year. We enjoyed reading every one of your stories!

The 2021 Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award Longlist

The New Quarterly is pleased to announce the longlisted submissions to the 2021 Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award. The longlisted writers and their stories are as follows:

“The silence between footsteps”

by Kimberley Aslett

“Florence”

by Hilary Ball

“Fire Sign”

by Megan Callahan

“Mushroom Girl”

by Lizzie Derksen

“Élodie”

by Rachel Deutsch

“The Last Time She Saw Charlie”

by Carol Hay

“train.in.g.day”

by Zilla Jones

“Morning Star”

by Chantel Lavoie

“Hang Dog Harry”

by MJ Malleck

“All is Her”

by Candice May

“On Ice, Skating”

by Andrea Reynolds 

“Time to Reset”

by Andrea Reynolds

“(In)auspicious”

by Alana Rigby

“Something Really Unbelievable”

by Nicole Smith

“The Cure”

by Michelle Spencer

“In the Garden”

by Alison Stevenson 

Stay tuned for the final lineup of winning pieces!

 

Finding the Form with Wayne Yetman

The Story Behind Poor Little Thing

TNQ has asked how I chose the form and structure for this story. I never think of such things. The starting point was a news report in the mid-1990s of a man perishing in an almost impossible accident in Toronto. I simply followed my nose from there.

I wrote the first section about 1996. It has barely changed since. I love it. The working title was “Bad Dog.” Unfortunately, nothing seemed to work after that grand opening.

In one version our anguished heroine wasted her nights driving an endless circuit of her neighbourhood. This culminated in her staring at the moon over a skating rink until she felt better and abandoned her compulsive driving. In another attempt the woman’s dog pointed her the way to a new life and love. My gorgeous opening had descended into genre predictability. I guess this is one of the downsides of starting without a plan. 

Years (even decades) passed while I wrote and published other stories but I always came back to this one. A recurring challenge was that my heroine didn’t seem to have a reason for living as she did. One lucky day I smashed out a few decent paragraphs which solved that (key woke lesson: blame the father). By now the title was “A Little Less Reliable.” This seemed like a big step forward. Sadly, I then had my heroine flee to her garage for another of her dark drives.

I experimented with a variety of points of view. At one point, Janes, a minor player in the final version, became the centrepiece for the whole story. In another version the scene shifted to Nova Scotia where the heroine’s puritanical father and her demented brother assumed starring roles. Ugh. 

Several years ago I gave up. I yanked out an entire section and used it as the basis for a new piece, which was almost immediately published by The Antigonish Review, under the title “A Little Less Reliable.” The original story seemed dead. 

But I couldn’t let it go. I finally conjured up a new character, Mrs. Cade. Somehow the pivotal point of the story flew onto the page with Cade saying: “Poor little thing.” This innocent comment not only set up the resolution of the story but lent it its final title. 

Soon after the story was accepted by TNQ. It would be my third appearance in this auspicious journal. But there was more torment ahead. 

One night I awoke realizing that the section of the story that had already been published in The Antigonish Review was still in the TNQ version. I emailed Pamela Mulloy confessing my self-plagiarism. She suggested I try replacing the offending section with new material. I almost wished that she had canned it because I was sick of the whole business. But fortunately a new section poured out of my fingers and seemed quite good. I am grateful to The New Quarterly for finally putting me out of my misery.

Have I answered TNQ’s questions about Form? I only write short stories so no decisions to make there. I used to run marathons and the notion of a new marathon writing a novel is not attractive. My preferred format is third person limited. I do not like first person, which too often becomes prey to virtue-signalling and thence to propaganda. But that’s just me. I wouldn’t evangelize on it. 

So there are pros and cons to writing without a plan. The con is that it can take 25 years to figure it out. The pros: the man focus becomes a woman focus, a straight white male writes a story about lesbians, the dogs play a role after all, and we discover that even the worst of events can yield some good. I scribble on. 

 

Wayne Yetman’s short fiction has appeared in The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, Grain, The Antigonish Review, The Dalhousie Review, FreeFall and Event. He placed second in the 2017 Grain short fiction contest and won the 2018 FreeFall short fiction contest. 

 

Photo by Yannick Pulver on Unsplash

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Finding the Form with Orin Krest

We were living about thirty kilometres from the equator in East Africa when I started writing about a snow storm. It was one of my first attempts at writing fiction, a practice that started as a way to kill time while my wife chased critters through the forest in the name of science. I worked at a yellowing plastic bistro set in the dining nook of our rustic cottage, often in the company of audacious monkeys who sneaked in through our paneless windows. They had never even heard of snow.

The idea at the heart of “Some Worse” arose several months earlier, during a visit with my grandfather in Nova Scotia. Though it was, as always, a joy to share his company, our conversation was spliced with long silences that I found troubling. “We used to have a lot more to talk about,” I thought, lamenting the decades I’d been away from my Maritime home.

But that was, as my grandfather would have said, a load of hooey. It soon occurred to me that while I likely prattled on more in my youth, our relationship wasn’t built on dialogue–he tended toward quiet and we spent much of our time together watching TV. No, we were bound by something more fundamental, the stubborn affection that flows in blood, the kindred entanglement that makes people spin in the same direction no matter their positions in the cosmos. I thought that type of bond could make for an interesting story (if I ever followed through on my plan to write stories).

For whatever reason, the image of two men forging along a snowy road came to me while I was wringing lake water out of my laundry on a muggy equatorial afternoon. I went to the bistro set with an iPad and managed to pound out a first draft before dinner. At the time, I thought taking an intuitive, rapid-fire approach was the only way to produce anything good. (Didn’t Kerouac write his road story that way?) But when I revisited the draft a few days later, I saw an insufferable mess, a confused stream of consciousness winding through fuzzy imagery. Dejected, I closed the document with the intent of leaving it for dead.

Six months later, my wife and I resumed our regular lives in Canada. Looking to break up the tedium of a daily train commute, I decided to give the men in the snow another chance. I attacked the draft in tiny bits, rewriting a short passage on the ride to work, ruminating on it throughout the day, re-rewriting it on the way home. With time, the story doubled in length and evolved in a million ways, but the core idea stayed the same: a loyalty that persists despite all other forces of nature.

My grandfather died last January, three days before TNQ accepted “Some Worse” for publication. It was comforting to know parts of him would be captured in print. His cap, his toothpick, his black cherry Dynasty. His quiet and steady air, his tenacious heart. I also found comfort in the editing process, which prompted further meditation on the idea that had inspired the piece. My time with my grandfather has ended, but that fundamental, stubborn bond endures. We’ll go on spinning the same way.

Orin Krest finds inspiration in nature, family, his legal practice, and his Maritime roots. He is currently writing a comedic novel about a workplace grudge that transcends death. 

 

Photo by Bailey Zindel on Unsplash

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The 2021 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest Results

The New Quarterly is pleased to announce the winners of the 2021 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest!

Winner
“Soar” by Chyana Marie Sage

 

Runner-Up
“Wave Any Ward” by Erin Soros

 

Third Place (tie)
“That Other Place” by Kathy Page

“The Singing Bone” by Sadiqa de Meijer

 

Honourable Mentions

“On Being Minimally Bereaved” by Amy Kaler

“Yelling Fire” by Alex Merrill

“Sun Flowers” by Suzanne Stewart

“A Place Called Home” by Nedda Sarshar

“Saint Vrain” by Tammy Armstrong

Look for prize winners and honourable mentions in The New Quarterly‘s Fall Issue 160! Thanks to all the writers who submitted this year. We enjoyed reading every one of your essays.

Mark Truscott’s Writing Space

Above is my writing space. (I have received permission to include this photograph on the condition that I acknowledge that the room’s current state is in part my fault.) Life doesn’t always conform to writerly ideals. Active kids, chaos, and full-time jobs happen, and our house is pretty small.

This is our living room, where I actually write. It’s perfectly nice, but during the hours I’m off work, the only time it’s quiet enough is from four-thirty until around seven each morning. So that’s my writing time. I’ve come to like this arrangement quite a bit, and indeed I believe it’s factored into my writing. In fact, I’m prepared to say this room in the early morning hours is the implicit setting of just about every poem I’ve written since 2008. I was certainly thinking of the view through the window when I wrote “Piano” (though it was winter).  

Mark Truscott is the author of three poetry books, most recently Branches. 

Photos courtesy of Mark Truscott. 

Cover image by Yannick Pulver on Unsplash 

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The 2021 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest Results

We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2021 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest!

First Place ($1000)
“Latin class” by Kieran Egan

Second Place ($500)
“Specializing in the Prehistory of Whales” by Sandra Kasturi

Third Place ($250 each)
“Surfing near Tofino” by Aaron Schneider

“Masks” by Terry Watada

Honourable Mentions
(to be published alongside our winning poems)

“On the qui vive on my QWERTY” by Anne Swannell

“If you come” by Sarah Tsiang

“When this is over” by Jennifer Mustapha

“Selling Soffio” by Cynthia Woodman

“Birthday Balloon” by Marco Melfi

“The Spirit Bugs of Algonquin Park” by Ken Victor

“Safe U Turn” by Callista Markotich

“Airing Evora’s Laundry” by Susanne Fletcher

Look for prize winners and honourable mentions in The New Quarterly’s Fall 2021 Issue 160!  Thanks to the many wonderful poets who submitted. We enjoyed reading every one of your poems.

The 2021 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest Longlist

The New Quarterly is pleased to announce the longlisted submissions to the 2021 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. The longlisted writers and their essays are as follows:

“Saint Vrain”
by Tammy Armstrong

“The Pull of the River”
by Ted Bishop

“The Singing Bone”
by Sadiqa de Meijer

“Soar”
by Chyana Marie Sage

“Happiness is a Warm Gun”
by Alison Dowsett

“Erosion”
by Adrienne Gruber

“I Draw The Eyes In”
by Jasmine Gui

“On Being Minimally Bereaved”
by Amy Kaler

“Source”
by Basma Kavanagh

“Flowering”
by Austen Lee

“They Tied On Their Aprons & Tried To Put Back The Stars”
by Jeanette Lynes

“I Can Feel Him Breathing”
by Tara McGuire

 “Yelling Fire”
by Alex Merrill

“That Other Place”
by Kathy Page

“Parting Gifts”
by Shirley Phillips

“A Place Called Home”
by Nedda Sarshar

“The Cry of the Poor”
by Lori Sebastianutti

“Wave Any Ward”
by Erin Soros

“Sun Flowers”
by Suzanne Stewart

“A Second Washing”
by Heather Thomson

“Hinge Wood”
by Darryl Whetter

Stay tuned for the final lineup of winning pieces!

Finding the Form with Anji Samarasekera

“Trophy” began as an assignment for a Children’s Literature class that I took in my second to last year of my MFA at the University of British Columbia. I had never written YA Fiction before and wanted to try my hand at composing a piece that would cross-genres and forms–be both adult fiction and YA and function as a short story but also the first chapter of a potential novel. 

The seed of the story was a real-life situation. I was pregnant with my second child, conceived via IVF, after years of infertility. My first child, seven years old at the time, was finally going to be a big sister and in my hormonal and grateful state, I kept thinking what if? As in, what if we hadn’t gotten pregnant with our second child? Would it have destroyed our marriage? Anyone who has gone through infertility knows how stressful and heartbreaking the journey is–I feel exceptionally fortunate to have come out of it with my marriage intact—but I could very well imagine things having turned out differently.

Because I was trying to write for younger readers (in addition to adults), I wanted the main character to be a young person and that’s when I struck on the idea of an unplanned pregnancy. I always knew that if we hadn’t been able to get pregnant again, I would mourn that loss for the rest of my life. It would have been a knife in the heart to find out that what I wanted so badly had happened so easily (and so unwantedly) in the body of someone close to me. Making that someone the cherished only daughter of the infertile mother was precisely the complication that I wanted to think about through this story, but from the perspective of that young girl who feels the burden of her parents’ grief acutely. 

“The way Wayne loves Harp feels true to not only their relationship but also to my relationship with my own father.” 

The setting grew out of my wanting to place a character somewhere we don’t expect her to be. A bi-racial, teenaged girl is not someone we tend to associate with hunting or gun culture. But because of who Harp is and because of how much she loves Wayne, this is a space that feels entirely natural to her. I loved the idea of the two of them sharing a passion, and the tenderness between them was very much an ode to the relationship between my older daughter and her dad. Of course, my husband says that he is nothing like Wayne and that is one hundred percent correct—but the way Wayne loves Harp feels true to not only their relationship but also to my relationship with my own father. 

It didn’t take many drafts to get to a “final” version of this story. I had the major elements in place after the first iteration and then subsequent re-writes were mostly dealing with sentences and excesses of language. Places where the imagery gets carried away. There was a lot of cutting because the story started out quite lengthy—over 7000 words. In the editing, I removed large swathes of backstory that would have been necessary for a novel but were distracting in a short story. I also worked with TNQ’s editor, Pamela Mulloy, on the pivotal moment, so that it captured the story’s larger themes while remaining convincing. The story became stronger as a result – at least I think so.

YA is an unfamiliar genre and so writing “Trophy” took me out of my comfort zone as a writer. On the other hand, the emotional terrain that the story covers are recurring themes in my work. I’m thrilled to be able to share “Trophy” with TNQ’s readers and who knows, it may very well become something bigger and I may become an accidental YA author after all! 

Anji Samarasekera writes fiction – both short and long – from Vancouver which is on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm(Musqueam), Skwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She has been shortlisted for The Masters Review Anthology Contest and longlisted for the Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award. A graduate of UBC’s Creative Writing School, she is at work on a novel set in Sri Lanka during the civil war.

Author photo by Erin Flegg, 2021.

Cover image by Sergei Akulich on Unsplash 

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